The Chaffinch. 41 



years past. It is so low that by standing on tiptoe 

 you could almost put your hand into it ; but they have 

 so wonderfully lichened it over to an exact resemblance 

 with the bark of the tree that it would be a very quick 

 eye indeed that would notice it, unless it followed the 

 bird returning — a beautiful illustration of what is now 

 called the protective instinct which nature has so 

 strongly bestowed on many of her children. The 

 chaffinch is in some ways a very noticeable bird ; it 

 is indeed almost the only one of the small birds which 

 pairs for life, and it has been said that it learns its 

 song anew each spring. If this is so, the chaffinch soon 

 regains his mastery. He is in many ways a meister- 

 singer among birds. He is never failing. He begins 

 with a lovely lilt, as it were ; a passage of old song, 

 blithe and debonnair, passes into the softest warble, 

 and after some mixed flourishes, with the finest sense 

 of contrast in them, closes with a sudden abrupt kind 

 of clash of notes. Mr. Waterton wrote thus well of 

 the chaffinch, and expresses the thought of many a 

 bird lover : — 



"Next to poor cock robin, the chaffinch is my 

 favourite bird. I see him almost at every step. He 

 is in the fruit and forest trees and in the lowly haw- 

 thorn; he is on the house-top and on the ground 

 close to your feet. You may observe him on the 

 stack-bar and on the dunghill, on the king's highway, 

 in the fallow field, in the meadow, in the pasture, and 

 by the margin of the stream. His nest is a paragon of 

 perfection. He attaches lichen to the outside of it 

 by means of the spider's slender web. In the year 

 1805, when I was on a plantation in Guiana, I saw 

 the humming bird making use of the spider's web in its 

 nidification, and then the thought struck me that our 



